T-Mare Wumpii

Red and green creature feature decks have always been one of my favorites, going all the way back to revised when I played a deck with Fire Elementals and Craw Wurms. This deck also featured  combat tricks like Giant Growth. Mana acceleration came in the form of Llanowar Elves and Wild Growth. Lightning Bolt, Disintegrate and Fireball added the direct damage component and, after being ripped off as noob in a trade, a lone Shivan Dragon was added to be the big finish. What the deck lacked in subtlety it more than made up for in sheer brute strength. The size and number of creatures you threw in front of your opponent, and the amount of direct damage you could aim directly at the face, usually ended up being too much for even the hardiest of opponents to handle.

Which bring us to this beaut! Not the most subtle of decks, it does not even have a win/loss ratio worthy of mentioning ... but what it does have, and it has it in spades, is the fun factor! When all is said and done this is, was, and always should be the primary reason to play this most wonderous of games ... having fun! Social magic is the foundation from which the Pro Tour was built, and social magic is what keeps the game growing. Magic is the ultimate Survivor in the world of TCG's, it has outwitted, outlasted and outplayed every single other pretender to it's throne.

Ok, enough of the "philosophizing" and onto the deck ...

The idea to build this deck came during one of my many attempts to get my collection organized. This for me is an ongoing and ever present conundrum, how to sort my collection and how to store it. I currently use a combination of shoe boxes, freezer storage containers and flip files. Seems like this blog posting is going to be littered with my being sidetracked, I promise to try and keep this to a minimum. In my neck of the woods we have no suppliers of nifty, strengthened cardboard containers capable of holding 5,000 cards, so we have to make a plan.

When I stumbled across the Timbermare and the Thundermare I knew that I had to build this deck. If you find them, you will build a deck (apologies to Kevin Costner). They idea became more of a reality when, during the same collection rationaliztion exercise, I stumbled across the Wumpii. 6/6 beasts with a converted mana cost of 4 are bargains at the price in my opinion. Their drawbacks lead to the fun in playing the deck. I drop Leatherface and ... my opponent drops a Raging Goblin VERSUS I drop Leatherface and ... my opponent drops Hypnox. You never know what is coming! You obviously hope that it is the Raging Goblin entering the battlefield and not the horror of a nightmare. The Wumpii are very underrated and deserve to be played more by us casual players.

The other creatures in the deck are there for the sole purpose of adding muscle ... with the exception of the Jungle Weaver and his cycling potential. Loamdragger Giant and Phantom Wurm round out the heavies. There are no one drop or two drop critters as they do not fit the theme of the deck. What I wanted for this deck was huge creatures ... and ways to make them humungous!

The supporting spells for this deck fall into three categories: mana acceleration and production, direct or  damage to creatures and creature boosting effects. The ability to give the already huge creatures trample, while it may seem like overkill to some, allowed certain spells (and lands for that matter) to force their way into this deck. There is nothing quite like feeling you get after announcing that Leatherface and his Shivan cousin are going into the red zone and then boosting one of them after blockers have been declared with Epic Proportions. The feeling you sometimes get after seeing the expression on your opponent's face after pulling it off comes a very close second.

Here it is, in all it's RG goodness, my friend T-Mare Wumpii!

#	Card name	Comments
2	Timbermare	A 5/5 elemental elemental nasty that only costs 3G to bring onto the battlefield, taps all other critters on entry into the fray and has haste, has echo too ... whoo hoo!
2	Thundermare	A 5/5 thundermare nasty with haste and taps all other critters when he enters the battlefield, he costs 5R to cast, more than his green buddy but no echo cost.
4	Hunted Wumpus	Big, green 6/6 beast wearing a Texas Chainsaw Massacre mask for only 3G, let's each opponent put a creature onto he battlefield when he blunders in
4	Shivan Wumpus	Big, red, 6/6 trampling beast for 3R, if an opponents sac's a land when he rolls onto the battlefield, he goes back to the top of your library
4	Jungle Weaver	An awfully big and ugly 5/6 spider with reach, that and the fact he cycles for 2 makes him really useful
2	Loamdragger Giant	More muscle for the deck comes in the form of this 7/6 giant warrior who has no other redeeming qualities whatsoever
1	Phantom Wurm	A rather average sized wurm of the phantom variety, which makes him rather difficult to kill, other than that I only have 1 and always wanted to play him
4	Savage Twister	A good old friend from Mirage, XRG and all creatures are savagely twisted for X, works for me
4	Search for Tomorrow	This deck needs lots of mana and this suspend card fills the role of land fetcher with aplomb
1	Petrified Plating	The creatures in this deck may already be big, but making them even bigger is lots of fun
4	Branching Bolt	Shards of Alara gave us this beauty which for only 1RG does either 3 points of damage to either a walking or a flying creature ... oh yes, or both
2	Epic Proportions	In a flash target creatures gets bigger to the tune of +5/+5 and earns the right to trample over any potential blockers ... squish!
1	Talisman of Impulse	Mirrodin gave us these very useful artifact mana sources, either tap for 1 or take a point of pain and tap for either R or G
2	Chromatic Sphere	A 1 drop artifact which can, when preceded by tapping one mana and offering it up as a sacrifice, provide you with 1 mana of any color ... and a card draw
2	Gruul Turf	Comes into play tapped, return a land you control to your hand ... thereafter it can be tapped to add RG to your mana pool
2	Skarrg, the Rage Pits	Taps for 1 colorless, or RG and tap gives target creature +1/+1 and trample, Guildpact's version of a mosh pit
8	Mountain	The ultimate source of red mana
11	Forest	The de facto standard when it comes to the production of green mana

NOTE: As an addendum to this post I would like to say a huge thank you to some people out there (you know who you all are) who have been very supportive and have donated cards to myself and traded with me to enable the building of decks like the one above. Magic monies are scarce and I am not going to go into details as to why. If anyone would like discuss these issues with me, please feel free to drop me an email, or post a comment. Thank you again to the Magic playing community at large, we are an awesome bunch of people!